Mini-Concept: New Option to 'Reset' Incognito Mode Without Closing All Tabs

Ideas To Uplevel Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode

Google Chrome’s incognito mode is useful for a whole lot of things, also way beyond the cliché dirty stuff one might prefer to be hidden from their browser history. Such as, for example:

Having more control of what Google and other company’s personalization algorithms take into account about your browsing behavior

Being able to sign into a website with different accounts

Letting someone else use your browser without leaving marks

Being treated like a stranger by a website

Going totally wild with some research or on Amazon without it haunting you later on

Or simply not seeing any benefit in the browser saving anything about some really unimportant stuff

Since Google Chrome came out all the way back in 2008, a lot of people certainly will have incorporated incognito browsing in their everyday browsing experience one way or another and partly have taken really extensive use of it.

So I think it’s very possible that one might find oneself in a situation, where you’ve got a lot of relevant tabs open in incognito mode, which you don’t want to close yet, but you might also want to replicate the initial experience of a new incognito window, for example with websites not knowing anything about you or the stuff that has happened during the incognito session up till then.

That is where this concept’s feature would turn out useful. As you can see in the concept image at the top, the idea is really straightforward: right click on an incognito window to access a new option to “Clear incognito cache”, which would clear all cookies and other data amassed during the current incognito session, but with all tabs staying open.

There’s currently no other way to do this. You either have to close everything or cannot start a new anonymous browsing experience. It surely would be a very niche thing, but it also wouldn’t clutter the browser any more and I think it would be a logical addition that could be useful in many situations and that users could incorporate in the way they browse the web in future, for an even slightly more powerful experience.

Specifically to accompany this article, I’ve also created a Chrome Extension. The “Incognito Mode Reset Button” has the exact functionality described above - clearing the current incognito session’s data without having to close all tabs -, only, instead of right-clicking, you have to click on the extension icon next to Chrome’s menu button.

What do you think about this mini-concept? Do you take use of Chrome’s incognito mode extensively in your browsing experience? In what ways could you imagine incognito mode being improved? And, of course, if you like the Incognito Mode Reset Button extension, feel free to leave a comment or review!